~The Road Less Taken~

Sunday, June 15, 2008

oh here comes another really weird dream.

i used to have a blog named "the dream machine", the chief aim of which was to keep track of my dreams.

well that blog would certainly have fulfilled its aim over the last week.

but on to the dream proper. (and the reason i'm revealing this one is because it involves nobody from around me. hint, hint.)

...

i was showing this friend around singapore's nature parks/places of interest to someone who likes nature (tree-huggers? nature-lovers?).

first we went to sungei buloh (the place of all my re escapades, including a certain "scam club"). nothing hugely interesting there. then we went on to a certain mysterious park.

the park was pretty normal (lots of brick paths and brick walls everywhere), except for the last, innermost part. which was where the weirdness all started.

there was a huge pool, filled with black water such that you couldn't see anything below the surface (or so we thought, until there was a clear counterexample later). but for the most part it was dark and opaque.

there was a relatively low wall guarding this pool, about up to hip level.

me (being the tour guide, although i have no idea how i know all this) told my friend (who was sort of spanish-australian), "this pool is the most dangerous part of the park. this pool contains sharks, and the water has been coloured black so as not to scare people when they see the sharks."

(i think now the more real reason was to prevent sharks from jumping out of the water and injuring the people around the pool by making them "blind" in the water.)

now there was no signboard that said "no swimming", but clearly no sane person would try to swim in that pool.

apparently a few girls, and my spanish-aussie friend went insane.

he jumped in, and began swimming around the edge. so i left him alone, and went off to do other things.

then i suddenly changed into a rafael nadal-like person. the (really really damn) pro tennis player, with the green sleeveless shirt and muscles to boot.

don't ask me why i chose to change into him. but i'm a supporter.

oh the setting changed to an airplane as well. i was sitting down in this rather spacious airplane, before getting up (to presumably play a match).

then the setting changed to a tennis court (playing tennis is a no-go on airlines. what if you break a window?), and i remember hitting a few balls.

(i'm not that good in real life, and i don't exactly remember the way it felt hitting those balls, but i hope it felt good. for all you know it could be a confidence-booster for my real-life game.)

ok so the match ended rather quickly (as a fair few of rafael nadal matches tend to, usually in his favour - about 99.9% of the time), and i returned back to the airplane (which was flying all the time, mind you), to get a rest. i had a bag of refreshments at my table when i returned, so that was a nice touch.

then suddenly, the plane started to slow down. looking out of my window, i could see some yellow vehicle (probably a van) beside me. apparently, we were in a traffic jam.

i told you the dream was weird.

so with nothing to do while the plane was in the jam, i decided to revisit my friend at the black pool.

when i went back, he wasn't dead, surprisingly. in fact, he had completed one round of the pool, and was doing his second round.

unfortunately, coming up to him was the king of the pool - the sharks.

(and this also disproves the apparent fact that nothing could be seen from outside the pool.)

so he was swimming, and we (me and a few other "supporters") were shouting furiously at him to get out or hurry up.

as he rounded the side close to us (the pool was an irregular shape) the shark came in to slam him against the wall. fortunately, it missed.

but more trouble was brewing. 2 other sharks were heading for him.

so he was nearing the end of his 2nd lap. the sharks were closing in, but he was slightly ahead. as he reached his end point, he heaved himself out of the pool...

only for the sharks to get a grip on his leg, with their teeth. he was desperately kicking out, hoping to free his leg, while the shark was holding on. it was tense.

eventually though, my friend won, and he did wriggle himself out of the pool and to safety.

i remember i was seeing a few instant replays (in the dream itself) of the struggle. and in the end we were just happy to see each other alive (not that people get killed very easily on a tennis court). so i should say i was happier to see him alive, and he was just happy to see/be alive.

my friend must have been a real adrenaline junkie.

that's where the dream ended, so you can evaluate for yourself whether that was plain weird, or *(%^*(^%#()^*&$ weird.

i remember reading once before, though, that using dangerous animals to motivate swimmers to swim faster was a technique used somewhere (hopefully in some fictional world), so there may be some truth to the dream.

on a sidenote, i read somewhere in the chinese book we're supposed to read over the holidays (like all holidays are supposed to be spent in ri, as instructed by our dearest and most motherly mother tongue department)(i hope you sensed sarcasm in that line, or you need to see the school counsellor) that:

"how fast one swims doesn't depend on the swimsuit, but the swimmer."

try telling that to the Speedo LZR Racer designers, and the 37 world record holders who used it.

back to the dream though - maybe my friend would have done better if he had worn the LZR Racer (he was wearing a pair of very normal swimming trunks).

so there we go. a weird dream pulled right out of fantasyland.

if you didn't already have official confirmation, now you do.

i'm a really strange kid sometimes.

I stopped to rest at 4:03 PM

Two roads diverged,and I-
took the one less taken...